Chile's copper dust does not stop at the classroom door
Dust sampled inside 38 schools in Calama carried copper, arsenic, lead and molybdenum at levels that tracked the outdoor air — with almost no attenuation for arsenic and lead.
Can you lower your PFAS levels? The experiment has not been run
A Copenhagen team has just published the protocol for the first study designed to test whether reducing PFAS exposure changes anything. That it is still a protocol tells you where the evidence stands.
Air purifiers cut indoor particles by more than half. The asthma benefit did not follow
A placebo-controlled trial in 164 children reduced fine particles 64% and found no improvement in symptoms. A smaller crossover trial found a benefit, but only in children whose asthma was poorly controlled.
Indoor air carries more PFAS than the outdoor air around it
Eight primary schools in Porto and 40 homes in the Faroe Islands were sampled by different teams asking the same question: how much of a person's PFAS exposure never touches food or water.
What 'fragrance' hides: household VOCs, the evidence, and where it thins out
A single word on a label can stand for dozens of unlisted compounds. A few, like formaldehyde, are established hazards; the claim that everyday scented products make the general public ill rests mostly on self-report.
Damp and mould are linked to asthma. The fix is the moisture, not the bleach
Health agencies conclude there is enough evidence to tie indoor dampness and mould to respiratory symptoms and asthma. Controlling the water source, not identifying the species, is what the evidence points to.
Gas stoves raise indoor pollution. The evidence links them to childhood asthma
Cooking with gas emits nitrogen dioxide indoors, and pooled studies tie it to a higher risk of childhood asthma. One US analysis attributes about one in eight cases to gas stove use — an association, not a proven cause.
Radon is the second-leading cause of lung cancer, and the only fix starts with a test
A colourless gas that seeps from soil into homes accounts for a large share of lung cancers in never-smokers. The evidence for testing is strong; the risk rises smoothly with concentration, with no clear safe level.
Carbon monoxide kills about 1,000 Americans a year. An alarm is the warning
The gas is colourless, odourless and produced by any fuel-burning appliance. Because the early symptoms mimic flu, a working CO alarm is the one defence public-health data support.